Articles
Articles and analyses from the INET community on the key economic questions of our time.

Nothing Natural About the Natural Rate of Unemployment
With unemployment reaching very low levels in major economies, despite low – and slowly rising – inflation, it’s time for central banks to rethink their reliance on the so-called natural rate. No numerical target for this rate can serve as an anchor for monetary policy.
Can Bitcoin Replace the Dollar?

America’s Rising, Invisible Debt
Why it’s time to repeal the debt ceiling and replace it with a ‘truth in borrowing’ act

How Economists Turned Corporations into Predators
The Idea That Businesses Exist Solely to Enrich Shareholders Is Harmful Nonsense

Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant?
As the Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow noted in 1987, computers are “everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Since then, the so-called productivity paradox has become ever more striking. Automation has eliminated many jobs. Robots and artificial intelligence now seem to promise (or threaten) yet more radical change. Yet productivity growth has slowed across the advanced economies; in Britain, labor is no more productive today than it was in 2007.

The Real Cause of the Italian Bank Bailouts and Euro Banking Troubles
How a Banking Union Has Created Deep Divisions that Undermine the Eurozone’s Stability

The Hidden Cost of Privatization
Why some goods and services should stay in the public domain

Did Young Voters Swing the 2017 UK General Election Result?
This blog post looks at the aggregate picture and collates some micro evidence in a more robust estimating framework to shed light on this question.

Against False Arrogance of Economic Knowledge
“The humility to accept that economic propositions cannot be universal would save us from self-defeating arrogance.” Economist Amit Bhaduri adds his perspective to our Experts on Trial discussion.

The Moral Burden on Economists
In his 2017 presidential address to the National Economic Association, Professor Darrick Hamilton warned that treating economics as a morally neutral ‘science’, and the discipline’s limited attention to structural barriers and overemphasis individual agency, has resulted in bad economics, and bad policy particularly as it relates to racial disparity.

Kanth: A 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding
Eurocentric modernism has unhinged us from our human nature, argues Rajani Kanth in his new book